PERL5300DELTA(1perl)

πŸ“¦
version 5.44.0 Β· 2 versions
, in arch rolling

πŸ’– perl5300delta πŸ’–

okay bestie, welcome to the perl5300delta page β€” it's the official tea on what's new for perl v5.30.0, and it's giving major glow-up energy. grab a snack, this one's long. πŸ“

✨ NAME ✨

perl5300delta β€” what is new for perl v5.30.0 πŸ’…

πŸ¦‹ DESCRIPTION πŸ¦‹

So this doc spills all the differences between the 5.28.0 release and the 5.30.0 release. no cap, this is the receipts. πŸ“œ

And heads up: if you're upgrading from something way older, like 5.26.0, you gotta read perl5280delta first, because that one covers the differences between 5.26.0 and 5.28.0. do it in order, bestie, don't skip steps. 🫢

🌸 Notice 🌸

sv_utf8_(downgrade|decode) are no longer marked as experimental. periodt. ✨ [GH #16822] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16822.

πŸ”₯ Core Enhancements πŸ”₯

Limited variable length lookbehind in regular expression pattern matching is now experimentally supported

okay so before this, using a lookbehind assertion (like (?<=foo?) or (?<!ba{1,9}r)) would just generate an error and refuse to compile, which was honestly rude of it. πŸ™ˆ Now it compiles β€” as long as the maximum lookbehind is at most 255 characters β€” but it raises a warning in the brand-new experimental::vlb warnings category. πŸ‘‘

why the warning? because it's a little caution flag that the precise behavior is subject to change based on feedback from use in the field. iykyk. πŸŽ€

See (?<=pattern) in perlre and (?<!pattern) in perlre.

The upper limit n specifiable in a regular expression quantifier of the form {m,n} has been doubled to 65534

the meaning of an unbounded upper quantifier {m,} is unchanged, bestie. it matches 2**31 - 1 times on most platforms, and even more on ones where a C language short variable is more than 4 bytes long. slay. πŸ’…

Unicode 12.1 is supported

Because of a change in Unicode release cycles, Perl jumps from Unicode 10.0 in Perl 5.28 all the way to Unicode 12.1 in Perl 5.30. it's a glow up fr fr. ✨

For details on the Unicode changes, see https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/ for 11.0; https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ for 12.0; and https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.1.0/ for 12.1. (Unicode 12.1 differs from 12.0 only in the addition of a single character, that for the new Japanese era name. that's it, one whole character, iconic.)

The Word_Break property, as in past Perl releases, remains tailored to behave more in line with expectations of Perl users. This means that sequential runs of horizontal white space characters are not broken apart, but kept as a single run. 🫢 Unicode 11 changed from past versions to be more in line with Perl, but it left several white space characters as causing breaks: TAB, NO BREAK SPACE, and FIGURE SPACE (U+2007). We have decided to continue to use the previous Perl tailoring with regards to these. πŸ’œ

Wildcards in Unicode property value specifications are now partially supported

You can now do something like this in a regular expression pattern:

qr! \p{nv= /(?x) \A [0-5] \z / }!

which matches all Unicode code points whose numeric value is between 0 and 5 inclusive. So, it could match the Thai or Bengali digits whose numeric values are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. πŸ”₯

This marks another step in implementing the regular expression features the Unicode Consortium suggests. 🧚

Most properties are supported, with the remainder planned for 5.32. Details are in "Wildcards in Property Values" in perlunicode.

qr'\N{name}' is now supported

Previously it was an error to evaluate a named character \N{...} within a single quoted regular expression pattern (whose evaluation is deferred from the normal place). That restriction is now removed. bye girl, you will not be missed. πŸ’€

Turkic UTF-8 locales are now seamlessly supported

Turkic languages have different casing rules than other languages for the characters i and I. The uppercase of i is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE (U+0130); and the lowercase of I is LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I (U+0131). Unicode furnishes alternate casing rules for use with Turkic languages. Previously, Perl ignored these, but now, it uses them when it detects that it is operating under a Turkic UTF-8 locale. main character energy from Perl, honestly. πŸ‘‘

It is now possible to compile perl to always use thread-safe locale operations

Previously, these calls were only used when the perl was compiled to be multi-threaded. To always enable them, add

-Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE'

to your Configure flags. πŸŽ€

Eliminate opASSIGN macro usage from core

This macro is still defined but no longer used in core. it's retired but not forgotten, lowkey. πŸ¦‹

-Drv now means something on -DDEBUGGING builds

Now, adding the verbose flag (-Dv) to the -Dr flag turns on all possible regular expression debugging. go off, debugger. πŸ”₯

πŸ’€ Incompatible Changes πŸ’€

bestie this is the scary section. read it. seriously. these will break your old code and they will not feel bad about it. 😭

Assigning non-zero to $[ is fatal

Setting $[ to a non-zero value has been deprecated since Perl 5.12 and now throws a fatal error. See "Assigning non-zero to $[ is fatal" in perldeprecation.

Delimiters must now be graphemes

See "Use of unassigned code point or non-standalone grapheme for a delimiter." in perldeprecation.

Some formerly deprecated uses of an unescaped left brace { in regular expression patterns are now illegal

But to avoid breaking code unnecessarily, most instances that issued a deprecation warning remain legal and now have a non-deprecation warning raised. See "Unescaped left braces in regular expressions" in perldeprecation.

Previously deprecated sysread()/syswrite() on :utf8 handles is now fatal

Calling sysread(), syswrite(), send() or recv() on a :utf8 handle, whether applied explicitly or implicitly, is now fatal. This was deprecated in perl 5.24.

There were two problems with calling these functions on :utf8 handles:

  • All four functions only paid attention to the :utf8 flag. Other layers were completely ignored, so a handle with :encoding(UTF-16LE) layer would be treated as UTF-8. Other layers, such as compression are completely ignored with or without the :utf8 flag. 😭
  • sysread() and recv() would read from the handle, skipping any validation by the layers, and do no validation of their own. This could lead to invalidly encoded perl scalars. πŸ™ˆ

[GH #14839] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14839.

my() in false conditional prohibited

Declarations such as my $x if 0 are no longer permitted. βœ‹

[GH #16702] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16702.

Fatalize $* and $#

These special variables, long deprecated, now throw exceptions when used. πŸ’€

[GH #16718] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16718.

Fatalize unqualified use of dump()

The dump() function, long discouraged, may no longer be used unless it is fully qualified, i.e., CORE::dump().

[GH #16719] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16719.

Remove File::Glob::glob()

The File::Glob::glob() function, long deprecated, has been removed and now throws an exception which advises use of File::Glob::bsd_glob() instead. she said "use the other one bestie". πŸ’…

[GH #16721] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16721.

pack() no longer can return malformed UTF-8

It croaks if it would otherwise return a UTF-8 string that contains malformed UTF-8. This protects against potential security threats. This is considered a bug fix as well. [GH #16035] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16035.

There are several sets of digits in the Common script. [0-9] is the most familiar. But there are also [\x{FF10}-\x{FF19}] (FULLWIDTH DIGIT ZERO - FULLWIDTH DIGIT NINE), and several sets for use in mathematical notation, such as the MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK DIGITs. Any of these sets should be able to appear in script runs of, say, Greek. But the design of 5.30 overlooked all but the ASCII digits [0-9], so the design was flawed. This has been fixed, so is both a bug fix and an incompatibility. [GH #16704] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16704.

All digits in a run still have to come from the same set of ten digits. that rule didn't go anywhere. πŸŽ€

JSON::PP enables allow_nonref by default

As JSON::XS 4.0 changed its policy and enabled allow_nonref by default, JSON::PP also enabled allow_nonref by default. matching energy, love that for them. 🫢

🌈 Deprecations 🌈

In XS code, use of various macros dealing with UTF-8

This deprecation was scheduled to become fatal in 5.30, but has been delayed to 5.32 due to problems that showed up with some CPAN modules. 😭 For details of what's affected, see perldeprecation.

πŸ‘‘ Performance Enhancements πŸ‘‘

  • Translating from UTF-8 into the code point it represents now is done via a deterministic finite automaton, speeding it up. As a typical example, ord("\x7fff") now requires 12% fewer instructions than before. The performance of checking that a sequence of bytes is valid UTF-8 is similarly improved, again by using a DFA. πŸ”₯
  • Eliminate recursion from finalize_op(). [GH #11866] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/11866.
  • A handful of small optimizations related to character folding and character classes in regular expressions.
  • Optimization of IV to UV conversions. [GH #16761] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16761.
  • Speed up of the integer stringification algorithm by processing two digits at a time instead of one. [GH #16769] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16769.
  • Improvements based on LGTM analysis and recommendation. (https://lgtm.com/projects/g/Perl/perl5/alerts/?mode=tree). [GH #16765] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16765. [GH #16773] β€” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16773.
  • Code optimizations in regcomp.c, regcomp.h, regexec.c.
  • Regular expression pattern matching of things like qr/[^a]/ is significantly sped up, where a is any ASCII character. Other classes can get this speed up, but which ones is complicated and depends on the underlying bit patterns of those characters, so differs between ASCII and EBCDIC platforms, but all case pairs, like qr/[Gg]/ are included, as is [^01]. ⚑

okay that's part 1 bestie, there's more coming, don't go anywhere 🫢

✨ Modules and Pragmata ✨

okay bestie, grab a snack because this is the longest list on the whole page and I am not skipping a single one of these version bumps. every module here got a glow-up, and you're gonna hear about all of them. πŸ’…

πŸŽ€ Updated Modules and Pragmata πŸŽ€

one bullet per glow-up, no exceptions. here we goooo:

  • Archive::Tar β€” upgraded from version 2.30 to 2.32.
  • B β€” upgraded from version 1.74 to 1.76.
  • B::Concise β€” upgraded from version 1.003 to 1.004.
  • B::Deparse β€” upgraded from version 1.48 to 1.49.
  • bignum β€” upgraded from version 0.49 to 0.51.
  • bytes β€” upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.07.
  • Carp β€” upgraded from version 1.38 to 1.50
  • Compress::Raw::Bzip2 β€” upgraded from version 2.074 to 2.084.
  • Compress::Raw::Zlib β€” upgraded from version 2.076 to 2.084.
  • Config::Extensions β€” upgraded from version 0.02 to 0.03.
  • Config::Perl::V β€” upgraded from version 0.29 to 0.32. this glow-up happened because there's a brand new configuration variable that has influence on binary compatibility: USE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE. lowkey important, bestie.
  • CPAN β€” upgraded from version 2.20 to 2.22.
  • Data::Dumper β€” upgraded from version 2.170 to 2.174
    • and also, Data::Dumper now avoids leaking when "croak"ing. no more little memory drips, we love to see it. 🫢
  • DB_File β€” upgraded from version 1.840 to 1.843.
  • deprecate β€” upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.04.
  • Devel::Peek β€” upgraded from version 1.27 to 1.28.
  • Devel::PPPort β€” upgraded from version 3.40 to 3.52.
  • Digest::SHA β€” upgraded from version 6.01 to 6.02.
  • Encode β€” upgraded from version 2.97 to 3.01.
  • Errno β€” upgraded from version 1.29 to 1.30.
  • experimental β€” upgraded from version 0.019 to 0.020.
  • ExtUtils::CBuilder β€” upgraded from version 0.280230 to 0.280231.
  • ExtUtils::Manifest β€” upgraded from version 1.70 to 1.72.
  • ExtUtils::Miniperl β€” upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.09.
  • ExtUtils::ParseXS β€” upgraded from version 3.39 to 3.40. and the tea here: "OUTLIST" parameters are no longer incorrectly included in the automatically generated function prototype. periodt. [GH #16746] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16746>.
  • feature β€” upgraded from version 1.52 to 1.54.
  • File::Copy β€” upgraded from version 2.33 to 2.34.
  • File::Find β€” upgraded from version 1.34 to 1.36.
  • File::Glob β€” upgraded from version 1.31 to 1.32.
  • File::Path β€” upgraded from version 2.15 to 2.16.
  • File::Spec β€” upgraded from version 3.74 to 3.78.
    • it now silences the Cwd warning on Android builds if "targetsh" is not defined.
  • File::Temp β€” upgraded from version 0.2304 to 0.2309.
  • Filter::Util::Call β€” upgraded from version 1.58 to 1.59.
  • GDBM_File β€” upgraded from version 1.17 to 1.18.
  • HTTP::Tiny β€” upgraded from version 0.070 to 0.076.
  • I18N::Langinfo β€” upgraded from version 0.17 to 0.18.
  • IO β€” upgraded from version 1.39 to 1.40.
  • IO-Compress β€” upgraded from version 2.074 to 2.084.
    • Adds support for "IO::Uncompress::Zstd" and "IO::Uncompress::UnLzip". ✨
    • The "BinModeIn" and "BinModeOut" options are now no-ops. ALL files will be read/written in binmode. like, every single one. no cap.
  • IPC::Cmd β€” upgraded from version 1.00 to 1.02.
  • JSON::PP β€” upgraded from version 2.97001 to 4.02.
    • JSON::PP as JSON::XS 4.0 enables "allow_nonref" by default.
  • lib β€” upgraded from version 0.64 to 0.65.
  • Locale::Codes β€” upgraded from version 3.56 to 3.57.
  • Math::BigInt β€” upgraded from version 1.999811 to 1.999816.
  • Math::BigInt::FastCalc β€” upgraded from version 0.5006 to 0.5008.
  • Math::BigRat β€” upgraded from version 0.2613 to 0.2614.
  • Module::CoreList β€” upgraded from version 5.20180622 to 5.20190520.
    • Changes to B::Op_private and Config
  • Module::Load β€” upgraded from version 0.32 to 0.34.
  • Module::Metadata β€” upgraded from version 1.000033 to 1.000036.
    • Properly clean up temporary directories after testing. tidy queen behavior 🧚
  • NDBM_File β€” upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.15.
  • Net::Ping β€” upgraded from version 2.62 to 2.71.
  • ODBM_File β€” upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.16.
  • PathTools β€” upgraded from version 3.74 to 3.78.
  • parent β€” upgraded from version 0.236 to 0.237.
  • perl5db.pl β€” upgraded from version 1.54 to 1.55.
    • Debugging threaded code no longer deadlocks in "DB::sub" nor "DB::lsub". huge. πŸ’€βž‘οΈπŸ’–
  • perlfaq β€” upgraded from version 5.021011 to 5.20190126.
  • PerlIO::encoding β€” upgraded from version 0.26 to 0.27.
    • Warnings enabled by setting the "WARN_ON_ERR" flag in $PerlIO::encoding::fallback are now only produced if warnings are enabled with "use warnings "utf8";" or setting $^W. iykyk.
  • PerlIO::scalar β€” upgraded from version 0.29 to 0.30.
  • podlators β€” upgraded from version 4.10 to 4.11.
  • POSIX β€” upgraded from version 1.84 to 1.88.
  • re β€” upgraded from version 0.36 to 0.37.
  • SDBM_File β€” upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.15.
  • sigtrap β€” upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.09.
  • Storable β€” upgraded from version 3.08 to 3.15.
    • Storable no longer probes for recursion limits at build time. [GH #16780] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16780> and others.
    • Metasploit exploit code was included to test for CVE-2015-1592 detection, this caused anti-virus detections on at least one AV suite. The exploit code has been removed and replaced with a simple functional test. [GH #16778] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16778>. like... not the actual exploit in the test suite bestie 😭 it's gone now, we're safe.
  • Test::Simple β€” upgraded from version 1.302133 to 1.302162.
  • Thread::Queue β€” upgraded from version 3.12 to 3.13.
  • threads::shared β€” upgraded from version 1.58 to 1.60.
    • Added support for extra tracing of locking, this requires a "-DDEBUGGING" and extra compilation flags.
  • Time::HiRes β€” upgraded from version 1.9759 to 1.9760.
  • Time::Local β€” upgraded from version 1.25 to 1.28.
  • Time::Piece β€” upgraded from version 1.3204 to 1.33.
  • Unicode::Collate β€” upgraded from version 1.25 to 1.27.
  • Unicode::UCD β€” upgraded from version 0.70 to 0.72.
  • User::grent β€” upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.
  • utf8 β€” upgraded from version 1.21 to 1.22.
  • vars β€” upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.
  • version β€” upgraded from version 0.9923 to 0.9924.
  • warnings β€” upgraded from version 1.42 to 1.44.
  • XS::APItest β€” upgraded from version 0.98 to 1.00.
  • XS::Typemap β€” upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.17.

πŸ’” Removed Modules and Pragmata πŸ’”

okay so this part is a little sad, but we're gonna be brave about it. πŸ«‚

The following modules will be removed from the core distribution in a future release, and will at that time need to be installed from CPAN. Distributions on CPAN which require these modules will need to list them as prerequisites.

The core versions of these modules will now issue "deprecated"-category warnings to alert you to this fact. To silence these deprecation warnings, install the modules in question from CPAN.

Note that these are (with rare exceptions) fine modules that you are encouraged to continue to use. Their disinclusion from core primarily hinges on their necessity to bootstrapping a fully functional, CPAN-capable Perl installation, not usually on concerns over their design. translation: they're not bad modules, they just stopped being load-bearing for bootstrapping. they're still iconic. πŸ‘‘

  • arybase has been removed. It used to provide the implementation of the $[ variable (also known as the "array_base" feature), letting array and string indices start at a non-zero value. As the feature has been removed (see "Assigning non-zero to $[ is fatal"), this internal module is gone as well.
  • B::Debug is no longer distributed with the core distribution. It continues to be available on CPAN as "B::Debug <https://metacpan.org/pod/B::Debug>".
  • Locale::Codes has been removed at the request of its author. It continues to be available on CPAN as "Locale::Codes <https://metacpan.org/pod/Locale::Codes>" [GH #16660] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16660>.

πŸ“š Documentation πŸ“š

πŸ¦‹ Changes to Existing Documentation πŸ¦‹

We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. If you find any we have missed, send email to perlbug@perl.org <mailto:perlbug@perl.org>.

bestie if you spot a doc that's still living in the past, pls email them. they literally asked. 🫢

perlapi

perlop

  • We no longer have null (empty line) here doc terminators, so perlop should not refer to them.
  • The behaviour of "tr" when the delimiter is an apostrophe has been clarified. In particular, hyphens aren't special, and "\x{}" isn't interpolated. [GH #15853] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15853>

perlreapi, perlvar

  • Improve docs for lastparen, lastcloseparen.

perlfunc

  • The entry for "-X" in perlfunc has been clarified to indicate that symbolic links are followed for most tests.
  • Clarification of behaviour of "reset EXPR".
  • Try to clarify that ref(qr/xx/) returns "Regexp" rather than "REGEXP" and why. [GH #16801] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16801>.

perlreref

  • Clarification of the syntax of /(?(cond)yes)/.

perllocale

  • There are actually two slightly different types of UTF-8 locales: one for Turkic languages and one for everything else. Starting in Perl v5.30, Perl seamlessly handles both types. 🌈

perlrecharclass

  • Added a note for the ::xdigit:: character class.

perlvar

πŸ’¬ Diagnostics πŸ’¬

okay bestie, so diagnostics is just the stuff perl yells at you β€” warnings, fatal errors, the whole dramatic repertoire. here's every addition and change to that output. want the complete list of diagnostic messages? that lives in perldiag, go read it, i'll wait 🫢

Changes to Existing Diagnostics

  • as already spilled up in "Incompatible Changes" β€” that deprecation warning "Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated here (and will be fatal in Perl 5.30), passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/" has been changed into a non-deprecation warning: "Unescaped left brace in regex is passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/". no more deprecation energy, it's just vibing now ✨
  • putting "\o{}" with absolutely nothing between the braces now gives you the fatal error "Empty \o{}". previously it said "Number with no digits". so now it uses the same wording as other similar constructs like "\p{}" β€” consistency, we love her πŸ’…
  • same glow-up but inside the scope of the experimental feature use re 'strict': an "\x{}" with nothing between the braces now gives the fatal error "Empty \x{}". before? "Number with no digits". again, same wording as similar constructs such as "\p{}". and ngl, an empty "\x" outside of re 'strict' is legal β€” though not wise β€” and it silently generates a NUL character. πŸ’€
  • Type of arg %d to %s must be %s (not %s) β€” trying to push, pop, etc. on a hash or glob now produces this message instead of complaining that they no longer work on scalars. [GH #15774] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15774.
  • Prototype not terminated β€” the file and line number are now reported for this error, bestie. finally. [GH #16697] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16697
  • under -Dr (or use re 'Debug') the compiled regex engine program gets displayed. it used to use two different spellings for infinity β€” INFINITY and INFTY. it now uses the latter exclusively, because that spelling has been around the longest. nostalgia core 🌈

πŸ› οΈ Utility Changes πŸ› οΈ

xsubpp

  • the generated prototype (with PROTOTYPES: ENABLE) would include OUTLIST parameters, but bestie those aren't arguments to the perl function at all?? this has been rectified. [GH #16746] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16746.

βš™οΈ Configuration and Compilation βš™οΈ

  • normally the thread-safe locale functions are only used on threaded builds. but it's now possible to force their use on unthreaded builds, on systems that have them available, by including the -Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE' option to Configure. look at her go πŸŽ€
  • improved detection of memrchr, strlcat, and strlcpy
  • improved Configure detection of memmem(). [GH #16807] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16807.
  • multiple improvements and fixes for the -DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT build option.
  • fixed the -DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT_PRIVATE build option.

πŸ§ͺ Testing πŸ§ͺ

separate error for push, etc. on hash/glob.

adds a test for goto &sub in overload leaking.

  • split t/re/fold_grind.t into multiple test files. divide and conquer πŸ’–
  • fixed intermittent tests that failed because of race conditions surfacing during parallel testing. [GH #16795] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16795.
  • thoroughly tested paragraph mode, using a brand new test file, t/io/paragraph_mode.t. [GH #16787] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16787.
  • some tests in t/io/eintr.t caused the process to hang on pre-16 Darwin. these tests are now skipped for those versions of Darwin. πŸ™ˆ

πŸ–₯️ Platform Support πŸ–₯️

Platform-Specific Notes

HP-UX 11.11

an obscure problem in pack() when compiling with HP C-ANSI-C has been fixed by disabling optimizations in pp_pack.c.

Mac OS X

Perl's build and testing process on Mac OS X for -Duseshrplib builds is now compatible with Mac OS X System Integrity Protection (SIP).

SIP prevents binaries in /bin (and a few other places) from being passed the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. for our purposes, that means DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH can't be passed to the shell, which means it can't be passed to the testing or build process, which means running perl couldn't find libperl.dylib. 😭

the workaround, bestie: the initial build of the perl executable expects to find libperl.dylib in the build directory, and then the library path is adjusted during installation to point at the installed library. iconic problem-solving tbh ✨

[GH #15057] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/15057.

Minix3

some support for Minix3 has been re-added. welcome back king πŸ‘‘

Cygwin

Cygwin doesn't make cuserid visible. that's it, that's the note.

Win32 Mingw

C99 math functions are now available. πŸŽ‰

Windows

  • the USE_CPLUSPLUS build option β€” long available in win32/Makefile (for nmake) and win32/makefile.mk (for dmake) β€” is now also available in win32/GNUmakefile (for gmake).
  • the nmake makefile no longer defaults to Visual C++ 6.0 (a very old version, unlikely to be widely used today). as a result, you're now required to specify CCTYPE, because there's no obvious choice of which modern version to default to instead. fail to specify CCTYPE and you get an error output and the build stops. periodt.

(the dmake and gmake makefiles automatically detect which compiler is being used, so they don't require CCTYPE to be set. this feature has not yet been added to the nmake makefile.)

  • sleep() with warnings enabled for a USE_IMP_SYS build no longer warns about the sleep timeout being too large. [GH #16631] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16631.
  • support for compiling perl on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 (containing Visual C++ 14.2) has been added. πŸ’œ
  • socket() now sets $! if the protocol, address family and socket type combination isn't found. [GH #16849] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16849.
  • the Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK build, with its early x64 compiler and tools, was accidentally broken in Perl 5.27.9. this has now been fixed. we love a comeback πŸ’«

πŸ”§ Internal Changes πŸ”§

  • the sizing pass has been eliminated from the regular expression compiler. an extra pass may instead be needed in some cases to count the number of parenthetical capture groups.
  • a new function "my_strtod" in perlapi, or its synonym Strtod(), is now available with the same signature as the libc strtod(). it provides strotod() equivalent behavior on all platforms, using the best available precision, depending on platform capabilities and Configure options, while handling locale-related issues β€” such as whether the radix character should be a dot or a comma.
  • added newSVsv_nomg() to copy an SV without processing get magic on the source. [GH #16461] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16461.
  • it is now forbidden to malloc more than PTRDIFF_MAX bytes. so much code (including C optimizers) assumes that all data structures will not be larger than this, so this catches such attempts before overflow happens. protective queen behavior 🫢
  • two new regnodes have been introduced: EXACT_ONLY8 and EXACTFU_ONLY8. they're equivalent to EXACT and EXACTFU, except that they contain a code point which requires UTF-8 to represent/match. hence, if the target string isn't UTF-8, we know it can't possibly match, without needing to try. efficiency slay πŸ’…
  • print_bytes_for_locale() is now defined if DEBUGGING. prior to this, it didn't get defined unless LC_COLLATE was defined on the platform.
  • Compiling under -DPERL_MEM_LOG and -DNO_LOCALE was broken. Bestie, it's fixed now. πŸ› οΈ
  • Perl 5.28 came in with an index() optimization for when you're comparing against -1 (or doing it sneakily, like >= 0). Problem was: when that optimization got triggered inside a when clause, it spat out a warning β€” literally Argument %s isn't numeric in smart match. That's fixed now. [GH #16626] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16626
  • The new in-place editing code was leaking directory handles. Not the vibe. Gone now. [GH #16602] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16602.
  • Warnings that come out of constant folding on overloaded values were being extra and throwing fake "Use of uninitialized value" warnings. No more. [GH #16349] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16349.
  • Fixed the whole "mutator not seen in (lex = ...) .= ..." situation. [GH #16655] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16655.
  • pack "u", "invalid uuencoding" now actually NUL-terminates the zero-length SV it produces, like it's supposed to. [GH #16343] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16343.
  • The debugging output for calloc() calls with -Dm got glow-up'd. [GH #16653] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16653.
  • Regexp script runs were refusing ASCII digits in some cases, which is rude. Fixed. [GH #16704] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16704.
  • On Unix-like systems that have a platform-specific technique for figuring out $^X, perl was failing to fall back to the generic technique when the platform-specific one flops (think: a Linux system where /proc isn't even mounted, iconic mess). This was a regression that snuck in with Perl 5.28.0. [GH #16715] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16715.
  • SDBM_File is way more resilient around corrupt database files now. πŸ’… But heads up, bestie: these improvements do not make SDBM files suitable as an interchange format. Periodt. [GH #16164] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16164.
  • binmode($fh); or binmode($fh, ':raw'); now properly removes the :utf8 flag from the default :crlf I/O layer on Win32. slay. [GH #16730] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16730.
  • The experimental reference aliasing feature was out here misreading array and hash slice assignment as being localised. Like, this:
\(@a[3,5,7]) = \(....);

was being read as:

local \(@a[3,5,7]) = \(....);

Not the move. [GH #16701] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16701.

  • sort SUBNAME inside an eval EXPR β€” when EXPR was UTF-8 upgraded β€” could panic if the SUBNAME was non-ASCII. Fixed, thankfully. [GH #16979] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16979.
  • Now correctly handles realloc() modifying errno on success, so that modification never becomes visible to the perl user, since realloc() gets called implicitly by the interpreter. The C standard actually permits this modification, but it's only ever been observed on FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT. [GH #16907] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16907.
  • Perl now exposes POSIX getcwd as Internals::getcwd() if it's available. It's meant for use by Cwd.pm during bootstrapping, and it may be removed or changed without notice β€” so don't get attached, bestie. This fixes some bootstrapping issues when you're building perl in a directory where some ancestor directory isn't readable. [GH #16903] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16903.
  • pack() can no longer return malformed UTF-8. If it would otherwise return a UTF-8 string containing malformed UTF-8, it croaks instead. This protects against potential security threats. πŸ”₯ [GH #16035] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16035.
  • See "Any set of digits in the Common script are legal in a script run of another script".
  • Regular expression matching no longer leaves stale UTF-8 length magic lying around when it updates $^R. That stale magic could make length($^R) return an incorrect value. Girl, the lies. Anyway, fixed. ✨
  • Reduced recursion on ops [GH #11866] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/11866.

This can prevent stack overflow when processing extremely deep op trees.

  • Avoided a leak in multiconcat with overloading. [GH #16823] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16823.
  • The handling of user-defined \p{} properties (peep "User-Defined Character Properties" in perlunicode) got rewritten to be in C instead of Perl. It's faster now, but in the process several inconsistencies and bug fixes came along for the ride:
    1. A few error messages have minor wording changes. This is basically because the new way is integrated into the regex error handling mechanism that marks the position in the input at which the error occurred. That wasn't possible before. The messages now also contain additional back-trace-like information in case the error occurs deep in nested calls.
    2. A user-defined property is implemented as a perl subroutine with certain highly constrained naming conventions. It was documented previously that the sub would be in the current package if the package was unspecified. That turned out not to be true in all cases β€” but now it is. πŸ’…
    3. All recursive calls are treated as infinite recursion. Previously they'd cause the interpreter to panic. Now, they cause the regex pattern to fail to compile.
    4. Same energy: any other error likely would lead to a panic; now it's just the pattern failing to compile.
    5. The old mechanism did not detect illegal ranges in the definition of the property. Now, the range max must not be smaller than the range min. Otherwise, the pattern fails to compile.
    6. The intention was to have each sub called only once during the lifetime of the program, so that a property's definition is immutable. This was relaxed so that it could be called once for all /i compilations, and potentially a second time for non-/i (the sub is passed a parameter indicating which). However, in practice there were instances when this was broken, and multiple calls were possible. Those have been fixed. Now (besides the /i, non-/i cases) the only way a sub can be called multiple times is if some component of it has not been defined yet. For example, suppose we have sub IsA() whose definition is known at compile time, and it in turn calls isB() whose definition is not yet known. isA() will be called each time a pattern it appears in is compiled. If isA() also calls isC() and that definition is known, isC() will be called just once.
    7. There were some races and very long hangs if one thread happened to be compiling the same property as another simultaneously. Those have now been fixed.
  • Fixed a failure to match properly.

An EXACTFish regnode has a finite length it can hold for the string being matched. If that length is exceeded, a second node is used for the next segment of the string, for as many regnodes as are needed. Care has to be taken where to break the string, in order to deal with multi-character folds in Unicode correctly. If we want to break a string at a place which could potentially be in the middle of a multi-character fold, we back off one (or more) characters, leaving a shorter EXACTFish regnode. That backing off mechanism contained an off-by-one error. 😭 [GH #16806] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16806.

  • A bare eof call with no previous file handle now returns true. [GH #16786] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16786
  • Failing to compile a format now aborts compilation. Like other errors in sub-parses, this could leave the parser in a strange state, possibly crashing perl if compilation continued. [GH #16169] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16169
  • If an in-place edit is still in progress during global destruction and the process exit code (as stored in $?) is zero, perl will now treat the in-place edit as successful, replacing the input file with any output produced.

So this lets code like:

perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; last'

replace the input file, while code like:

perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; die'

will not. Partly resolves [GH #16748] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16748.

  • A regression in 5.28 caused this code to fail:
close(STDIN); open(CHILD, "|wc -l")'

because the child's stdin would be closed on exec. That has now been fixed. 🫢

  • Fixed an issue where compiling a regexp containing both compile-time and run-time code blocks could lead to trying to compile something which is invalid syntax.
  • Fixed build failures with -DNO_LOCALE_NUMERIC and -DNO_LOCALE_COLLATE. [GH #16771] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16771.
  • Prevented the tests in ext/B/t/strict.t from being skipped. [GH #16783] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16783.
  • /di nodes ending or beginning in s are now EXACTF. Why do we care, bestie? Because we do not want two EXACTFU joined together during optimization, forming an ss, sS, Ss or SS sequence β€” those are the only multi-character sequences which may match differently under /ui and /di. 🧚

🌸 Acknowledgements 🌸

okay so bestie, the tea is: Perl 5.30.0 represents approximately 11 months of development since Perl 5.28.0, and it contains approximately 620,000 lines of changes across 1,300 files from 58 authors. πŸ’–

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 510,000 lines of changes to 750 .pm, .t, .c and .h files. periodt.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.30.0 β€” roll call, no cap: Aaron Crane, Abigail, Alberto SimΓ΅es, Alexandr Savca, Andreas KΓΆnig, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Brian Greenfield, Chad Granum, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari MannsΓ₯ker, Dan Book, Dan Dedrick, Daniel Dragan, Dan Kogai, David Cantrell, David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, E. Choroba, Ed J, Eugen Konkov, FranΓ§ois Perrad, Graham Knop, Hauke D, H.Merijn Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, Jakub Wilk, James Clarke, James E Keenan, Jerry D. Hedden, Jim Cromie, John SJ Anderson, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Matthias Bethke, Nicholas Clark, Nicolas R., Niko Tyni, Pali, Petr PΓ­saΕ™, Phil Pearl (Lobbes), Richard Leach, Ryan Voots, Sawyer X, Shlomi Fish, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steve Hay, Sullivan Beck, Tina MΓΌller, Tomasz Konojacki, Tom Wyant, Tony Cook, Unicode Consortium, Yves Orton, Zak B. Elep.

the list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of most of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker. Noteworthy in this release were the large number of bug fixes made possible by Sergey Aleynikov's high quality perlbug reports for issues he discovered by fuzzing with AFL. 😭πŸ”₯

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish. πŸ¦‹

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution. πŸ“š

πŸ› Reporting Bugs πŸ›

If you find what you think is a bug, bestie, you might check the perl bug database at <https://rt.perl.org/>. There may also be information at <http://www.perl.org/>, the Perl Home Page. 🌐

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of perl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team. πŸ“¬

If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue. πŸ”

🫢 Give Thanks 🫢

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks. πŸ’Œ

πŸ‘€ SEE ALSO πŸ‘€

  • The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.
  • The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
  • The README file for general stuff.
  • The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.

πŸ’– that's the whole vibe, bestie β€” this page's source/version is perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and it's literally PERL5300DELTA(1perl). slay, bye! πŸ’…

πŸ“¦ where this page comes from
  • arch rolling: perl 5.44.0-1 Β· Artistic-1.0-Perl AND GPL-1.0-or-later
  • πŸ’– girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms